Trading cards, heroes, and whistleblowers.

This past summer, I drove to my hometown to see my two nieces and their children, who were visiting my brother. While there, I overheard my two grandnephews talking about sports and their collections of sports cards. One claimed he possessed a card worth $50; the other one countered by claiming to own a card worth $200! I asked to see some cards, so one ran to the bedroom and brought back a thick, expensive-looking photo album crammed neatly with cards. The two boys, immensely well-informed about baseball (and basketball and football), gave me a quick course on the heroes of the sport.

As I drove home that day, I thought much about those boys and wondered about their apparently exclusive passion for sports heroes. Were no other heroes available to them? That train of thought led me to think about our great comic book hero Superman. It turned out to be an enjoyable afternoon--traveling through the beautiful Ozarks, thinking about Sports heroes, Superman, and, before I reached by destination, whistleblowers.

Two differences separate whitleblowers from Superman. The first is obvious: Super man is Superman. He is practically omnipotent, whereas whistleblowers are people like you and me. The second difference may not be apparent at first. A being gifted with such extraordinary power as Superman could change the world for the good of humanity. He or she could end global hunger, eliminate nuclear weapons, and rescue populations from their inhuman nations (from Rwanda to China).

Instead, what does Superman do (or at least did in the comic books of my youth)? He combats evil on the level of the community in which he lives--Metropolis--and ignores the ruinous problems consuming not only his own nation but the world. He is not busy fighting destructive practices by corporations and government and other determinative institutions, the $500 billion corporate savings-and-loan gangsters, a disastrous ten-year war against an Asian nonenemy, or ozone depletion and global water pollution; rather, he tackles bank and mail truck robbers. In other words, the primary evil Super man opposes is local underworld crimes against private property. He's not so super after all, in the astounding restriction of his immense powers.

Whereas Superman applies superhuman powers to solve comparatively small problems, in contrast, whistleblowers apply ordinary human capacities to solve large problems. A whistleblower is a truthteller, but of a specific kind: one who exposes wrongdoing. But that definition is still too general. Take Father Roy Bourgeois. He has been imprisoned several times for protesting the training of Latin American soldiers at Fort Benning, Georgia, who afterward slaughtered and tortured the citizens of their own country. Though a heroic public pro tester against the wrongs of an institution of which he is not a part, Father Bourgeois is not a whistleblower.

A more accurate definition of a whistleblower is one who makes public the crime and corruption of powerful people and institutions from within the institution--as an employee--and who thereby risks the loss of employment in bringing falsehood, corruption, and injustice to light. The whistleblower could be your neighbor, your coworker, your spouse--or perhaps you. The whistleblower could be your Census Bureau employee, like Billie Garde who reported her boss for sexual harassment and theft. Garde endured many months of threats of being fired and was passed over for promotion. Her boss, however, was later sentenced to a year in prison for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government. Garde went on to earn a law degree and to assist fifty six employees at the South Texas Nuclear Plant who had registered more than 600 safety violations at the plant and then been threatened.

A whistleblower could be your local pharmacist. Bill Altland of Fayetteville, Arkansas, exposed the excessive drug dispensing by Razorback team trainers at the University of Arkansas and was pressured both professionally and socially to drop the accusations. But some of the malefactors were punished, though lightly.

Whistleblowers become heroes of conscience be cause they believe in the most basic moral precept: honesty. Because they speak out against waste. fraud. abuse. and dancer for the good of the rest of us--often at great personal risk--they should be hailed as major heroes of a democracy.

But so far the price of truth has been high. Take, for example, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, which killed six astronauts and a school teacher. The price was high for Roger Boisjoly, a senior scientist at Morton Thiokol, Inc., in Utah, where the shuttle's solid fuel boosters were manufactured and serviced. Boisjoly's duties included examining the boosters for damage after NASA recovered and returned them to Thiokol. He discovered that the O-rings (gigantic rubber washers) were eroding, and he knew the low outside temperature at launching made the washers inoperable, so he asked for a delay in the launch but was overruled. After the disaster, he testified before the investigative commission--and was promptly demoted.

Chuck Atchison also paid a high price for blowing the whistle. He was a safety inspector at the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant in Texas. Because the near meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1977 had prompted him to be con scientious, he exposed safety infractions at the Comanche Peak plant. According to Atchison, his employer--the Brown and Root construction company--fired him, branding him a trouble maker. Not able to find comparable work and faced with mountiny debts, he and his wife sold their house and moved into a trailer. Later, when he was called to testify, he received anonymous threats to his life.

Boisjoly and Atchison are not alone. In a 1987 survey of whistleblowers, 84 percent in private industry were fired and 75 percent in government were demoted. The vast majority reported harassment, including bugged telephones and other surveillance, and the consequences to their private lives are often severe, resulting in divorce, financial problems, and deter) orated health. Yet more than 80 percent of the whistleblowers surveyed said they would take the same action again if similar circumstances arose.

Bill Bush, an aerospace engineer at NASA, helps us to understand why. Bush protested NASA's wasteful management to the media and was punished with the loss of his civil service rank and diminished salary, which took three years to regain. But he does not regret blowing the whistle:

During my life of sixty years, I took more than I was willing

to give. I missed many opportunities to be of service

to others because of my twin rules: "Doris rock the boat"

and "Me first" As a consequence, I became a rudderless

ship in a purposeless journey to no place. Then, in

1974, I abandoned my cardinal rules forever. Only since

then have I made any

favorable progress

toward balancing my

deplorable take-and-give

tally sheet.

Examples of the harm done by the absence of whistle blowers are as numerous as unexposed criminals.

The types of hardships experienced by whistle blowers in the past are decreasing as support for these heroic people increases. Two organizations now offer support to whistleblowers. Since 1976, the Government Accountability Project has provided them with legal support. GAP helps defend whistleblowers against reprisals, assists them in pursuing their dissent more effectively, advocates stronger free speech laws, and teaches the law of dissent through scholarly works and law school clinical programs. For example, dissent by more than 100 GAP clients, who worked as federal meat and poultry inspectors, stopped various USDA plans to gut or eliminate current food inspection programs; and GAP attorneys have won more than $7 million in settlements. Unfortunately, the organization can take on only about five new cases annually from the 200 to 500 requests.

The Cavallo Foundation created in 1987 to reward acts of moral courage in business and government. Every year, the foundation awards three prizes of $10,000 each to people who speak out. One recipient of the Cavallo Prize is Leon Bard, who, in 1988, revealed the evasion of quality control practices by military contractors in the construction of navy cruisers at Bath Iron Works in Maine. Bard was subsequently punished after his revelation

The government has also come to recognize the value of whistleblowers. Twenty six states have instituted constraints on the ability of employers to discharge employees at will and now allow employees to sue their employers for harassment or wrongful dismissal. On the federal level, the Challenger disaster galvanized public support for effective whistle blower legislation. The Thiokol-NASA attempt to silence the Thiokol engineers sparked two important pieces of legislation to protect, and even reward, such whistleblowers. Under the Whistleblower Protection Act, employees who are demoted or fired during the appeals process must be reinstated in their previous positions at the same salary, with retroactive compensation. More important, the new law allows whistle blowers to use private legal counsel to litigate in court on their behalf.

The other measure passed in the wake of the Challenger disaster provides cash rewards in cases of fraud by government contractors. The 1986 False Claims Act revised a Civil Warera law, which punished sellers of adulterated gunpowder and other wrongs, to permit whistle blowers to file lawsuits against wrongdoers, guaranteeing them 10 percent to 30 percent of any awards for damages. In 1989, the first major case to test the False Claims Act resulted in a $14 million settlement by a firm that overcharged the air force and navy for ball bearings. The whistleblower, George Butenkoff, collected $1.4 million as his share. Not only by law but by reward are whistleblowers now officially regarded as all stars.

In one way whistleblowers do resemble Superman: their stories never end. Nor do invasions, mass killings, corporate crime, military waste, arms proliferation, hunger, or congressional campaign corruption. But whistleblowers have advanced--a little--the struggle for accountability. Blind loyalty, ambition, intimidation, and corruption no longer reign supreme over honesty. And we have reason to hope for an improving ethical climate in which government agencies and private corporations will be more honest. Not Superman but ordinary whistleblowing men and women give us hope.

And whistleblowers share some of the same qualities as our sports heroes. Toronto Blue Jays baseball player Jackie Moore, after being told that economist John Kenneth Galbraith was on the same flight, once declared, "I remember him. Short guy, mustache, played third base for Pittsburgh" An athlete or a whistleblower might not be well educated or knowledge able, but they each demonstrate their integrity--as pitcher or hitter or truthteller--for the public good. Yogi Berra was once asked by a reporter, "Were you apprehensive in the twelfth inning?" Yogi replied, "No, but I was scared" All of the whistleblowers I have read about were also scared, but they remained true to their moral principles.

Perhaps some day, in addition to sports cards, my grand nephews might trade all kinds of hero cards. How about the great A. Ernest Fitzgerald, who fought the Pentagon a half dozen years and incurred a mountain of expenses just to tell the truth about the waste of taxpayers' money. And what about Jane Addams, Joan Baez, Charles Dickens, Albert Einstein, Margot Fonteyn, Mohandas Gandhi. . . .

James R. Bennett is a professor in the English Department of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas and has served as editor of several publications.